Saturday, 24 May 2008

Facebook have enhanced the feature that allows users to import activity from other sites. There is a new option on the Mini-Feed called 'Import'.

Clicking this opens up a box that allows users to select from a variety of different social media sites that they can choose to display in their Facebook News Feed and Mini-Feed.

The Facebook import feature now includes Flickr, Del.icio.us, Digg, Picassa, Last.fm, Google Reader, Pandora, Hulu, StumbleUpon, YouTube, Pandora, Yelp and Blog / RSS feeds. There is a lot of talk currently about Data Portability and Facebook are PRing this as a big step forward in opening Facebook to more sites. I am confused by this though.

Facebook's success came after opening up its API to developers so that they could develop applications that users could incorporate into their profiles and feeds. There are already applications that enable users to include their Del.ic.ious / Flickr / YouTube / blog RSS etc feeds into their profile and their mini-feed / news feed. What's the difference between importing your Del.icio.us activity through an application or using the new functionality to import your Del.icio.us feed?

As far as I can see they both do the same thing and all the new features do is cut out the application developer. This doesn't seem much of a new development or am I missing something?

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